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Comment by jrabone | Hacker News Reader

What is this bullshit? Looking for a job? Convince me you know what you're talking about. Show me something I didn't know and convince me it's worth knowing. Demonstrate you know big 'O' notation (and maybe tell me how little 'o' and \omega are different). Draw me a binary search tree. Show me how a skip list works. Fill in a multithreaded producer / consumer skeleton and get it correct, then make it fast. Explain how UTF-8 works from first principles (i.e. what's wrong with ASCII? How would you fix it? Now how do you optimise the answer?)

I don't give a crap if you know $TRENDY_WEB_LANG. We don't write anything in either Python or Ruby, and likely never will.

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I thought the content of you comment was interesting (and sounds like interviewing with you might be pretty cool), but the tone was really harsh and unlikely to spark any interesting conversation. Something like this might have worked a bit better:

"It's not the language that matters when looking for a job, it's important that you convince me you know what you're talking about. Show me something I didn't know, then convince me it's worth knowing. Demonstrate you know big 'O' notation (and maybe even tell me how little 'o' and \omega are different). Draw me a binary search tree. Show me how a skip list works. Fill in a multithreaded producer / consumer skeleton and get it correct, then make it fast. Explain how UTF-8 works from first principles (i.e. what's wrong with ASCII? How would you fix it? Now how do you optimise the answer?)

Python and Ruby are both trendy right now, and interesting in their own right, but we don't write anything in either language and likely never will. The underlying technical/CS understanding is not only more important, but common to almost all problems."

Honestly, this tone is better. I downvoted you for suggesting an alternative because, honestly, parent is just as indignant as I am at this article's bullshit.

You generally don't get a job by just learning a language. That's no different than looking for a journalist gig after you've written for a few months. There's much more to do.

seems like you really like the guys who can memorize "cracking the coding interview" and "data structures for interviews"!

I've been in a work place like that. The focus was on optimum algorithms and seeking out the last microsecond of performance. In the mean time, the actual usability was atrocious and took end-users 30mins to figure out how to use the app.

Sometimes you need to see the forest from the trees!

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